Three months later
Barry Conway stabs at something gray and shapeless with a plastic fork. He looks around him for the thousandth time, trying to come to terms with how a man with so much could have fallen so far. Men in police uniforms with batons patrol the edges of the cafeteria, and Barry is just one of hundreds of inmates, all wearing the same orange jumpers.
He recalls how women used to look at him when they saw him get out of one of his expensive cars. They used to try to discreetly check their makeup and sometimes they would fight over who got to approach him.
He had it all, didn’t he?
No. Not everything. He never had the company. Dean Sharp made sure of that. Had he known Dean would be both the means to his fortune and the cause of his undoing, he would’ve put a bullet in the man’s head when they first met all those years ago.
When Dean’s lawyers presented the case and shared the recorded conversation, there was little that could be done. Forty years without parole, and for Barry, it might as well be life. Hell, he’s already forty-five, and the idea of living out forty years in this depressing, mind-numbing shithole is too much.
Dean won, didn’t he? But why should that be a surprise. Dean won at everything.
Pictures of a little girl with blonde hair and an angelic face line the shelves in a ranch-style suburban home. Of the nearly forty pictures displaying the little girl, only one also shows a slightly older girl who looks similar enough to related. The man and woman sitting at the long dining table scrape knives and forks across their plates, eating their meals without enthusiasm.
“Camille called the other day,” says the man.
“Fred,” says the woman with a tone of exasperation. “We’ve talked about this.”
“No, Janice. You’ve talked about this.”
She sets her fork and knife down, glaring across the table at her husband. “I don’t want to talk about Camille. Frankly, I don’t give a shit what she said.”
“Janice. Maybe it’s time we take a step back and look at ourselves here. Think of how we’ve treated her.”
“Is that why she called? She wants an apology?” asks the woman.
“No. She apologized to us. She wanted us to know she understood how we felt, but that she wasn’t going to be coming to see us again. Not ever.”
“Good riddance,” says the woman, but her eyes move uncertainly across the table.
“Really?” asks the man. “Is this what we wanted, Janice? One of our daughters lost her life, and what did we do?”
“We did what any parent would do. We protected her memory.”
“By pushing away our daughter who was still alive?” asks Fred. “Did we ever stop to think what Vanessa would’ve wanted?” Fred’s voice falters and he slams his fist down on the table. “She loved Camille. She loved her so fucking much, and we ostracized Camille. We did the last thing Vanessa would’ve wanted out of our own weakness, and we hid behind the idea that we were protecting her memory.”
“That’s not true,” says Janice quietly.
“It’s probably the only true thing I’ve said in years. And I’m ashamed of myself for letting it go this long.”
Janice’s lip quivers. She looks off toward the ceiling as if searching for the words she wants. “Did she say anything else?”
“She said she wasn’t coming to see us, but that we could come see her, if we ever changed our mind about things.”
A tear slips down Janice’s cheek, landing on her half-eaten steak. “Maybe we could have handled things differently. But I don’t know…”
“I want to go see her. I want to see her new life. I want to apologize,” says Fred.
Janice watches him for a long time before nodding her head and looking toward the solitary picture in the house of both Vanessa and Camille.
Tanner Sharp sits in a hollowed out cargo plane beside Selene, who holds tightly onto him even though her parachute is fastened to the ceiling of the plane for safety. The bay doors are wide open and air rushes through the plane, making it almost impossible to hear anything but the wind in their ears.
Selene looks at Tanner, who has a habit of asking her on extravagant dates like this where they do incredible things and have the times of their lives. The only problem is she keeps thinking they are a set up for the proposal of a lifetime, so she finds herself waiting and watching for the moment he will finally propose, but it still hasn’t come.
After dozens of let downs, she has finally decided to just enjoy the moment for once and stop obsessing about the ring. If he loves her like he says, he’ll realize sooner or later he should make a move.
So when Tanner gets down on one knee and holds out the ring, it takes Selene a few seconds to realize what she’s looking at.
“Is that…” she says, but her words are drowned out by the roar of wind.
Tanner’s mouth moves and he’s grinning, but Selene can’t make out the words. All she knows is she’s not about to jump out of this plane--she isn’t sure she was ever going to be able to do that. She may be a little on the crazy side, but jumping out of a plane was pushing it for her. Tanner promised she’d want to do it once she got up here, but she doubted it, especially now.
She reaches for the ring, but he pulls back, grinning in a way she has come to fear. He hooks a little string through the ring, ties it off, and then she realizes the string is attached to a tiny backpack--no, a tiny parachute.
He moves to the open bay door, holding the ring and the tiny backpack out. Selene tries to run to stop him but he yanks a small cord and sends the backpack out into the open sky. The parachute deploys and the ring starts its slow descent toward the ground. Tanner is nearly knocked to his feet by the small woman who explodes out of the plane, speeding toward the ring without a moment’s hesitation.
The door to a small music shop on one of the busiest streets of the city dings. A woman and her little girl walk inside. The little girl has dark red hair and freckles spotting the bridge of her nose. She hums melodically while her mom leads her to the back of the shop. Dean Sharp stands behind the counter, flashing a smile and nodding his head as they pass.
He looks to be in his mid thirties with deep, green eyes like a forest just before sunset. They are arresting eyes, and were it not for the sharp jawline and masculine features of his face, they would be the only thing most people noticed. But the mom notices all of it, including the way his collared shirt hugs the lean and toned body beneath.
“Hi Mr. Dean,” says the little girl to the man.
“Hey there, May. Did you practice this time?” he asks.
“On the car ride over,” admits the mom.
He laughs. It’s a good laugh. A laugh that makes the woman think Mr. Dean must be a very happy man, and why shouldn’t he be? She imagines women must line up for him, at least they would, if he wasn’t happily engaged to Camille.
The pair passes the racks of guitars and heads to the back of the shop where the lessons are held. Camille comes out of her office and absolutely beams when she sees the little girl.
“Miss Camille!” cries the little girl, rushing forward to hug Camille.
Camille’s blonde hair falls around her shoulders in springy locks. Her smile is radiant and her skin has a rosy, youthful glow to it as she kneels down to hug May. “I heard you haven’t been a good practicer again,” scolds Camille, but her tone is playful.
“I’ll practice next week,” promises the little girl.
“Camille,” says the mother, “Is that a baby bump I see?”
Camille places a hand on her lower stomach, making it clear how her normally flat belly curves out slightly. She waggles her eyebrows playfully. “That’s exactly what you see.”
Punished by the Prince
Punished by the Prince
Elizabeth just learned she’s a princess, and she’s promised to a prince.
Problem is, the prince is my younger brother.
But this little princess is mine, and mine alone. Screw traditi
on.
So when I catch her trying to escape, I take matters into my own hands.
I bring her to the dungeon for punishment, and a night she’ll never forget.
Finding out I’m actually a princess was a shock. Finding out there’s a prince who has been waiting to marry me when I turned eighteen? Yeah, that was a shock too.
I’m not exactly princess material, even if I do have the evil sisters and neglectful parents thing going on. My life was supposed to be boring, cruel, and most of all, uneventful.
But all that changed.
I’m taken to a city that shouldn’t exist--a kingdom that shouldn’t exist. It’s a whole new world full of possibility, where teams of servants cater to my every need and my room is at the top-most tower of a palace. It should be perfect. It should be a dream come true.
But my husband-to-be would give a glacier the chills, and one look makes me want to get as far away from this man and this place as I can.
I’m captured during my escape by the most breathtaking man I’ve ever seen. He says he is going to make sure I’m “punished” for trying to escape.
I never knew punishment could be so… intimate, or so enjoyable. And I definitely didn’t expect to learn Mr. Tall Dark and Gorgeous is actually a prince too--my husband-to-be’s older brother, in fact.
Behind the Book
This book came at a pretty confusing time for me. In early 2017, I had kind of stumbled on a plan of attack for getting eyes on my books: identify the trends that readers are interested in, and make sure my books hit the trend and telegraph it clearly from the title, cover, and blurb. I started to think it was going to be almost easy going forward. I’d just keep an eye on developing trends and keep writing the best books I could with the right packaging.
Well… it was easy until it wasn’t. 2017 began with the Single Dad trend. It seemed like any book with “single dad” in the title had a huge leg up on the competition. After about two months, it seemed like “virgins” were the thing. And then it got more complicated. There wasn’t a clear trend. Some authors were doing really well with royalty books (Alexa Riley and Madison Faye), but beyond that, there wasn’t any super obvious choice.
Given that my favorite genre of book to read on my own time is fantasy, I think I got a little too excited at the idea of writing a royalty book. I had also never read a royalty romance book, so I didn’t actually understand what readers were expecting out of them. Now, I can probably guess that it’s something different than what I wrote, but I’m not going to lie. I have no regrets about Punished by the Prince. I had such a good time writing it.
Punished by the Prince probably weaves in a lot more fantasy elements than you’ll find in other royalty romances like it, and I think for some readers that was off-putting. Others seemed to really just enjoy that it was something fresh and new like they’d never read.
It wound up hitting rank 20 on Amazon, but the pages read were surprisingly low for the rank, which meant that despite outwardly appearing like a success, it was actually the starting point for my struggles that lead up to Knocked Up by the Dom.
Struggles or not, I still love the book. It is easily one of my personal favorites, and I still wish I had been brave enough to finish the follow-up book. I wrote 25,000 words of “Claimed by the Prince,” and then chickened out on finishing it when I realized the pages read were so low for Punished by the Prince. Maybe I’ll still go back and finish it some day though!
1
Elizabeth
My eighteenth birthday is shaping up to be completely and totally average. Unfortunately, average for me is probably a lot more like garbage that smells so bad you can practically taste it if you breathe through your mouth. My parents make decent money and they love each other. My little sisters get along great and they’re well-adjusted at school. The only problem is for as long as I can remember, they’ve all treated me like a wet rat that just landed on the table in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner.
I make the best out of it, though. It’s become a hobby of mine to keep a running tally of all the different ways they find to hurt me. There’s the small, everyday neglect like cooking enough breakfast for everyone but me, or the fact that no one else in the house has chores except me. Then there’s the way I always got punished for getting a “B” on my report card, but my sisters didn’t. Then there’s the big stuff. The whoppers. Like the time I learned that my parents used up my college fund to pay for beer runs and vacations--but hey, at least I had a college fund at some point. There was also the time they “accidentally” left me at a rest stop in Florida on a ninety degree day with about three thousand percent humidity; the worst part was they didn’t even come back right away when I finally bummed a stranger’s phone to call them. They stopped to see Carl’s Alligator Farm first, and I’m pretty sure they even grabbed dinner because they all miraculously claimed they didn’t need to eat when I asked where we were going to stop.
So when I say my eighteenth birthday has been an average, par-for-the-course kind of eighteenth birthday, that’s exactly what I mean. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. Don’t get me wrong. I guess my family could take their neglect of me to an entirely different level and leave me home while they go celebrate my birthday without me. So, you know, at least I was invited to my own birthday party! Hooray for me.
The restaurant is my family’s favorite: Jasper’s Alehouse. The booths are oversized, the portions are oversized, and even our waitress must be at least six foot two. Country music plays over crackling loudspeakers, but it’s barely audible over the drunks at the bar who wear flannel shirts, cowboy hats, and sunglasses even though we’re inside.
“They said they would be here by seven,” I say, sneaking a glance at my phone. I laugh a little nervously. “Which means they have minus thirty minutes, but I know they’ll come.”
Erica sighs dramatically, adding a roll of her mascara framed eyes for emphasis. She’s two years younger than me, but she’s the daughter my parents wish I was. She has silky black hair that falls straight past her shoulders. Everything about her screams perfection, but it only takes half a brain and a few minutes to see past that. “Your friends ditched you, Elizabeth. Wake up and smell the rejection.”
“So should we break into the cake?” asks my dad. His eyebrows are pinched in a permanent expression of scrutiny, like he just can’t quite believe what he’s looking at. The only time his expression softens is when he looks at my mom, Erica, or Anise, my other little sister. To be fair, he has been known to look pretty lovingly at hot wings too, but I don’t think that counts.
Anise claps her hands together excitedly. “We should’ve broken into the cake thirty minutes ago.” Anise has my sister’s black hair and the same can-do-no-wrong reputation with my parents, but where Erica is thin as a rail, Anise has my mom’s genes and wears her curves proudly.
My mother laughs, not even glancing my way before half-standing to start cutting the cake. The first slice--and the biggest, goes to Anise, who digs in right away. Erica gets the next slice, which is just a touch smaller than Anise’s slice, even though Erica will probably only take a bite or two. Then my dad is served, then my mom serves herself, and then she cuts a sliver of cake only a little bigger than a mouthful off and serves it to me.
“It looks really good,” I say, eyeing the cake. I know it’s hopeless, but I hope if my mom sees me enjoying it enough, she might give me more than a hamster’s portion.
“Most cakes do,” snaps my mother. “Sit up straight, how many times have I told you?”
I do as I’m told because that’s the only way to survive in this family. For me, at least. I pick at my portion of cake, trying to drag it out and savor it as much as I can. I also try not to think about Kerry and Angel, who promised they would be here. My gut tells me they went to Kyle’s graduation party instead.
Kerry and Angel are nice to me, but I have no illusions about how deep our friendship runs. If it’s convenient for them, they will be nice to me. If it com
es down to choosing between me and something more fun, then I know they will choose the fun. I can’t blame them though. My parents are always lurking around when friends are over, glaring and making everyone so uncomfortable that the thought of hanging out with me gives them the creeps.
I’m just about to officially give up on the evening when I notice the two men who walk into the restaurant. Even from the corner of my eye, I can tell they are both beautiful--it’s not normally a word that comes to mind when I see men, but these men defy normal. The first man through the door has dusty brown hair that’s cut short on the sides and longer on top, where it’s carelessly pushed to the side. There’s a few days’ stubble across his chiseled jaw that I involuntarily imagine tickling my face as I kiss those perfect lips. But most noticeable of all are his dark eyebrows that make his blue eyes scream for attention. The clothes he wears would probably seem goofy or out of place on most men, but somehow this man’s athletic, powerful build helps him pull it off.
His jacket is high collared and tapered at the waist, but it reaches down to his upper thighs. Beneath, he wears a collared shirt with some sort of subtle, embroidered gold pattern that stands out against the white of his shirt. There’s also a large, expensive looking ring on his finger bearing some kind of insignia.
The man behind him is built like he rips tires in half in his spare time. He has blonde hair that’s a little long for my tastes, though I can see it driving some women wild. His eyebrows are the same shape as the other man’s, but slightly less dark and less arresting, and the gray eyes beneath carry a coldness that is absent in the man I assume to be his brother’s face. He’s stunning, though, but where the first man is breathtaking like sunrise in a warm forest, this man has the cold, harsh beauty of an icy mountain range.
Bad for the Billionaires: A Bad Boy Billionaire Bundle Page 79
